New Mother And Father Quotes & Sayings

My mother worked for more than a decade before marrying. She went to New York City to get a master's degree. And she continued to work as a teacher and a principal until she was forced to retire.Both she and my father instilled in my sister and me a deep love of learning. — Samuel Alito

(pg.31)
As it was, my first days on Earth were somewhat anticlimactic. Mother and Father seemed so happy tempting and corrupting that I didn't want to interrupt them. But the fact was that I hadn't the slightest clue what to do with myself. I tried to convince cows to take over the world, to rampage across the fields slaughtering all in their wake, to start a new religion of udder worship, to build cities devoted to the consumption of grass, their aqueducts running with fresh milk. I even prepared a pictorial presentation of cows traveling into outer space aboard butter-powered space churns, but the cows seemed unconvinced, and soon returned to wondering how many stomachs they had. The current belief was seventeen. Cows:Unambitious. — George Pendle

I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there. — George Takei

Not all babies are cute when they're born no matter how many new parents try to convince you otherwise. This is yet another lie the half-baked "theys" lead you to believe. Some babies are born looking like old men with wrinkled faces, age spots, and a receding hairline. When I was born, my father George took my hospital picture over to his friend Tim's house while my mom was still recuperating in the hospital. Tim took one look at my picture and said, "Oh sweet Jesus, George. You better hope she's smart." It was no different with my son, Gavin. He was funny looking. I was his mother, so I could say that. He had a huge head, no hair, and his ears stuck out so far I often wondered if they worked like the Whisper 2000, and he was able to pick up conversations from a block away. — Tara Sivec

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child's ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother's. — E.L. Doctorow

O holy Jesus, Gentle friend, Morning Star, Midday sun adorned, Brilliant flame of righteousness, life everlasting and eternity, Fountain ever-new, ever-living, ever-lasting. . . . Son of the merciful Father, without mother in heaven, Son of the true Virgin Mary, without father on earth, True and loving Brother. — Kenneth McIntosh

My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants. — Junot Diaz

Still, he could feel a fine cord stretched between them, a thin luminous fiber that ran from his chest all the way across the continent and forked into theirs. Never before had he lived through a fever without his mother; when he'd been sick in Debrecen she'd taken the train to be with him. Never had he finished a year at school without knowing that soon he'd be home with his father, working beside him in the lumberyard and walking through the fields with him in the evening. Now there was another filament, one that linked him to Klara. And Paris was her home, this place thousands of kilometers from his own. He felt the stirring of a new ache, something like homesickness but located deeper in his mind; it was an ache for the tie when his heart had been a simple and satisfied thing, small as the green apples that grew in his father's orchard. — Julie Orringer

And what will you call her, then?" Nancy asked the new mother. "Abigail," Naomi said. "We will call her Abigail." "Ah," Nancy said with a smile of approval. "'Tis Hebrew, meaning 'the father's joy. — Melanie Schmidt

We're vulnerable to repeating history, especially if we don't know what's driving us. For example, it may be a family tradition to marry someone with addiction problems, or who is an injured bird in need of caretaking. Or, you may be drawn to guys who remind you of your distant, unavailable father
or your ill-tempered mother
with the unconscious belief that you can take an old story, and through the power of your love, give it a new, happy ending. — Harriet Lerner

Came to deeply regret giving President Bush the benefit of the doubt on that vote. He later asserted that the resolution gave him the sole authority to decide when the clock had run out on weapons inspections. On March 20, 2003, he decided that it had, and he launched the war, with the UN weapons inspectors pleading for just a few more weeks to finish the job. Over the years that followed, many Senators came to wish they had voted against the resolution. I was one of them. As the war dragged on, with every letter I sent to a family in New York who had lost a son or daughter, a father or mother, my mistake became more painful. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

After wolf number 10, the father of the first group of pups born in the park, was killed by a local hunter after wandering south of park boundaries, program officials rounded up the mother and the helpless pups, put them back into the acclimation pen, and provided them with food for several months. Even when the pups got a bit older, program managers feared that the mother would have a hard time taking care of them by herself when they were released. Then, on the day they were to be released, in an event that no biologist has yet been able to explain, a bachelor wolf living miles away in another part of the park showed up outside the pen, just in time to form a new family unit. — William R. Lowry

My father is the most genial Midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner - financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy - so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his daughters into being more prepared.When he retired, he reached new levels of preparedness, so his car contained bottled water, hand wipes, a roadside emergency kit with flares, books on tape, a coin dispenser, and two hand towels to use as makeshift bibs so he and my mother could drive and eat without making a mess. — Jancee Dunn

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, "Oh God," and my father answering cozily from the silo, "Were you calling me, dear? — Peter De Vries

I am an immigrant in a sense. What happened was that my father was stationed in New York when my mother became pregnant, and she said, "I've got to go to Sweden so this child can be born there, because you don't have any idea where you're going to be transferred next." — Claes Oldenburg

My whole family is in the arts some way or the other. My father was a cellist in a symphony outside Chicago that was a side-job, he was a scientist. My mother was a dancer in New York. She was next-door neighbors with Dorothy Loudon and they moved to New York together. Mom was a dancer in New York for several years before she got married. My sister was a classical pianist. And my brother was a partier. So it all just seemed to work. — Jason Graae

Things happen in my physical body, in my relationships. I've buried three fathers and a mother. I've had a doctor tell me I've got a tumor in my brain. And when you face those situations, they transform you, they change you, and when you're able to break through them to a new level, they allow you to have gifts to give other people. — Tony Robbins

I loved school. I loved new shoes and lunch boxes and sharp pencils. I would hold dance contests in tiny finished basements with my friends. I roller-skated in my driveway and walked home from the bus stop on my own. We never locked our door. I had a younger brother whom I loved and also liked. I thought my mother was the most beautiful mother in the world and my father was a superhero who would always protect me. I wish this feeling for every child on earth. — Amy Poehler

With this money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture, and this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls. You think just because you've made a little money you can get a new hairdo and some expensive clothes and turn yourself into a lady. But you can't, because you'll never be anything but a common frump, whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing. With this money, I can get away from every rotten, stinking thing that makes me think of this place or you! — James M. Cain

Every poem is a love poem, my dad had said. I'd always thought he meant romantic love...but there were so many kinds of great love: mother and daughter love. Father love. Best friend love. Aunt love. Mother's best friend love. Friendish friendesque love. Love for the living and love for the dead. Love for who you really are, for those weird parts of yourself that only a few people understand. Love for things you yearn to do, for putting words in a page. Love for traveling, for people and seeing new ways to live. Love for the world... — Margo Rabb

There are ways I made sense of my mother later. How fifteen years with my father had left great blanks in her life that she was learning to fill, like those stroke victims relearning the words for car and table and pencil. The shy way she looked for herself in the oracle of the mirror, as critical and hopeful as an adolescent. Sucking in her stomach to zip her new jeans. — Emma Cline

I'd work to make it hip again to spend time in our fabled and fabulous land. But with a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, I would probably be better suited as mayor of New York. — Geraldo Rivera

My mother and father always supported my passion for acting. I think they just kind of expected me to move to New York and become an actress and have all these adventures. — Jennifer Garner

Except that my father got a raise, and my mother didn't because she doesn't get paid for housework, and my sister stopped reading those self-esteem books because she met a new boy — Stephen Chbosky

In the beloved community of 'Our Father,' the same desperate love that a mother has for her baby or that a child has for his or her daddy is extended to all our human family. Biological love is too small a vision. Nationalism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives or the people of our own country is not a bad things. But our love does not stop at the border. We now have a family that includes by transcends biology and geography. We have family in Iraq, Peru, Afghanistan and Sudan. We have family members who are starving and homeless, dying of AIDS and living in the midst of war. This is the new family of our Father. — Shane Claiborne

That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.
Quoth Mandarax:
Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!
- GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS — Kurt Vonnegut

And I dreamed of a home long ago in New England, my little kitkats trying to go a thousand miles following me on the road across America, and my mother with a pack on her back, and my father running after the ephemeral uncatchable train, and I dreamed and woke up to a gray dawn, saw it, sniffed (because I had seen all the horizon shift as if a sceneshifter had hurried to put it back in place and make me believe in its reality), and went back to sleep, turning over. "It's all the same thing," I heard my voice say in the void that's highly embraceable during sleep. — Jack Kerouac

As for any society in Portsmouth, that could at all make amends for deficiencies at home, there were none within the circle of her father's and mother's acquaintance to afford her the smallest satisfaction: she saw nobody in whose favour she could wish to overcome her own shyness and reserve. The men appeared to her all coarse, the women all pert, everybody underbred; and she gave as little contentment as she received from introductions either to old or new acquaintance. The young ladies who approached her at first with some respect, in consideration of her coming from a baronet's family, were soon offended by what they termed "airs"; for, as she neither played on the pianoforte nor wore fine pelisses, they could, on farther observation, admit no right of superiority. — Jane Austen

To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing
I'm sorry, I would rather not go on. — Yann Martel

I was born on 7 September 1917 at Sydney in Australia. My father was English-born and a graduate of Oxford; my mother, born Hilda Eipper, was descended from a German minister of religion who settled in New South Wales in 1832. I was the second of four children. — John Cornforth

My father emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the age of 12. He received his higher education in New York City and graduated in 1914 from the New York University School of Dentistry. My mother came at the age of 14 from a part of Russia which, after the war, became Poland; she was only 19 when she was married to my father. — Gertrude B. Elion

This is education, understood as a help to life; an education from birth, which feeds a peaceful revolution and unites all in a common aim, attracting them as to a single centre. Mothers, fathers, politicians: all must combine in their respect and help for this delicate work of formation, which the little child carries on in the depth of a profound psychological mystery, under the tutelage of an inner guide. This is the bright new hope for mankind. — Maria Montessori

The Sleeping

I have imagined all this:
In 1940 my parents were in love
And living in the loft on West 10th
Above Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses
On their bedroom walls the night they got married.

I can guess why he did it.
My mother's hair was the color of yellow apples
And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.

I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight.
It is hard for me to imagine that
My parents made love in a roomful of roses
And I wasn't there.

But now I am. My mother is blushing.
This is the wonderful thing about art.
It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleeping
As it might have late that night
When my father and mother made love above Rothko
Who lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses. — Lynn Emanuel

When my late father died - now I'm in mourning for my late mother - that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, I will not let you go until you bless me. — Jonathan Sacks

Back in New York, my dad refused to admit that he had a wife, much less a daughter on the way. This fantasy came to an end when he picked up his mail to find a postcard from a grinning woman, with a swelling belly, firing off automatic weapons with a group of equally happy Uzbek men. The caption read, 'Enjoying the afternoon with your daughter!'

On July 19, exactly four weeks before I was born, my father opened the door to find a woman wearing a burka, the traditional dress of Iran. When my mother finally went into labor at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, my dad was finally forced to venture outside his circle of comfort. Having done so - and meeting me - he realized it wasn't so bad out there. — Nicolaia Rips

Sometimes he'd write my mother's new name under his on a scrap of paper ... then, the one that hurt her teeth to see, Mrs. Brock Connors-as if, by marrying, my father would be himself, and also become her. — Laura Kasischke

My grandfather had been on the New York City force with his 11 brothers around the turn of the century. He was killed in the line of duty. My father, who was 16, was the oldest son, so he had to quit school and go to work to support his mother. — Bonnie Bedelia

Many of you no longer have mothers. You have lost your fathers. But you have education. Here, if you are smart enough to accept it, you will be educated. Education will be your mother. Education will be your father. While your older brothers fight this war with guns, when the bullets stop, you will fight the next war with your pens. Do you see what I'm telling you? He was hoarse by now and he grew quiet. - I want you to succeed, boys. If we are ever to have a new Sudan, you must succeed. — Dave Eggers

An unemployed father is always considered more detrimental to the family than an unemployed mother, and at the same time, child psychologists kept coming up with new responsibilities for parents that seemed to fall to the mother alone. — Elisabeth Badinter

My mother was determined that I should be able to walk two miles. If you could walk two miles, she said, you could get to most places you needed to get to. Actually, this is a fallacy. The fact that you can, with great difficulty, and taking an unconscionably time about it, walk two miles, will not get you anywhere you need, or at any rate want, to go. There were times when a wheelchair would have added another dimension to my life, but that was a forbidden subject; and it was not until many, many years later, long after my father and I were alone, that I took the law into my own hands and bought one; and instantly, dazzled with the new freedom that it brought me, swept my father off to his old haunts on an Hellenic cruise. — Rosemary Sutcliff

For me, the most powerful way to write about something is through the absence of it. Rather than writing about what it was to become a new mother, I wrote, for example, a father facing death and addressing his estranged son about the regrets of his relationship. — Nicole Krauss

My father is a Japanese-American and my mother is a Caucasian. So obviously, New Year's Day is big for our family, you know, oshogatsu. We had obon festivals every year. All those things. — Scott Fujita

Son: Father, you are my father. You sired me. I have sired no one because I left the primordial. I left you, I studied, I suffered, and my visions were pure. Before me, my father, new horizons were opened.

Father: Yes, I am your father. I sired you and nowhere did I go. Where I was in the beginning, there I remained. I dwell in the old home, my estate is as it was. I spawned, I lived with your mother. Then I lived with peasant women and girls, spawning. I surrounded myself with chickens, roosters, turkeys. My poultry lay dozens of eggs a day. But I studied nothing, never did I suffer. My horizons remain the same, oh just the same. These spaces, ancient, veritably Russian, assembled around us are all - all just the same.

("Adam") — Andrei Bely

(We loved Mother too, completely, but we were finding out, as Father was too, that it is good for parents and for children to be alone now and then with one another ... the man alone or the woman, to sound new notes in the mysterious music of parenthood and childhood.)
That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person. I saw the golden hills and the live oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since; and I saw the dimples in my little sister's fat hands in a way that still moves me because of that first time; and I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be. — James Joyce

The Census Bureau is thinking of creating a new category because so many kids don't know how to describe themselves using the existing categories. I call these kids the "Keanu Reeves Generation," after the actor who has a Hawaiian father and a Welsh mother. — Richard Rodriguez

Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my friends and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the maple under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would perch on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each day with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these images to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were lost as long as I was there. — Alice Sebold

thought of Dr. Court and was sorry that she was going to be disappointed. Joey knew his mother would be upset, but she had Donald and the new baby. It wouldn't take her long to see that it was all for the best. And his father. His father would just get drunk again. Joey kept his eyes open. He wanted to see the trees rush up at him. He took a long breath, held it, and dove. — Nora Roberts

My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s. — David Lee

My father became a mythical figure, more force than man ... he was a force my mother would use as a threat of wrath and punishment." In "Father Close, Father Far" New California Writing — Dagoberto Gilb

My father was a dark-skinned brother, but my mother was a very fair-skinned lady. From what I understand, she was Creole; we think her people originally came from New Orleans. She looked almost like a white woman, which meant she could pass - as folks used to say back then. Her hair was jet-black. She was slim and very attractive. — Ice-T

In this place that we live
my West, my father's North, and my mother's new hemisphere
rabbits in a burning field of grass can catch on fire. They run to a clear place where there is no fire, but, in doing so, light it up because their fur is burning. That way, in trying to save themselves, they spread the fire more ... And it speeds to everyone. — Alberto Alvaro Rios

The little child who was to have done so much was born before the turf was planted on its father's grave. It was a boy; and I, my husband, and my guardian gave him his father's name. The help that my dear counted on did come to her, though it came, in the eternal wisdom, for another purpose. Though to bless and restore his mother, not his father, was the errand of this baby, its power was mighty to do it. When I saw the strength of the weak little hand and how its touch could heal my darling's heart and raised hope within her, I felt a new sense of the goodness and the tenderness of God. — Charles Dickens

When we hang up, I sigh long and look out the window to the darkness over the ocean, no delineation between water and sky. It's always disorienting when I speak to my mother, that pull of her voice back into our old life even though both of us have tried to move beyond it.

In her soft Caribbean accent I hear my brother's laughter, see us both as children playing together in the backyard when it was still covered in crunch green grass and our toys were new.

Mami's voice was the song of our home, even with no father, even as we lived with that black mass of the unspoken, even with the marks on our bones we didn't know we carried.

Through all life's uncertainty, we felt anchored by the love in her voice. — Patricia Engel

My mother is a first generation American. Her father worked in the Roebling Steel Mill in Trenton, New Jersey.And yet my mother became the first person in her family to get a college degree. — Samuel Alito

I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America. The mother and father osprey stay together. It's a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children. They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter - the mother and father ... — Alan Lightman

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education. — John Knowles

If Rosie's mother had known that eye colour was not a reliable indicator of paternity, and organised a DNA test to confirm her suspicions, there would have been no Father Project, no Great Cocktail Night, no New York Adventure, no Reform Don Project - and no Rosie Project. Had it not been for this unscheduled series of events, her daughter and I would not have fallen in love. And I would still be eating lobster every Tuesday night.
Incredible. — Graeme Simsion

It is hardly surprising that the harbinger of God's love has been accused of hatred of the human race. Who has a right to speak thus of love for father and mother, for son and daughter, but the destroyer of all human life on the one hand, or the Creator of a new life on the other? Who dare lay such an exclusive claim to man's love and devotion, but the enemy of mankind on the one hand, and the Saviour of mankind on the other? Who but the devil, or Christ, the Prince of Peace, willy carry the sword into men's houses? — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

My father was a Norwegian tenor and my mother a New York Irish librarian. — David Johansen

My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut. — Carol W. Greider

With just about every script, in almost every corner of the set, I was faced with the truth: This was my parents' life. My mother had sat in handcuffs; my father had once worn an orange jumpsuit like the dozens that sat folded in our wardrobe department. For the other actors and me on our show, this was all fantasy, the re-creation of a world we knew little about; for Mami and Papi, it could not have been any more real or painful...I've had so many scenes in which Flaca & I are doing the dirty work, like cleaning the kitchen or mopping the floors, which is when I think of my parents most. Long before they ended up in prison, they'd spent years handling the nastiest jobs, the ones often avoided by others. Manual labor. Low pay. No respect. They must've felt so trapped. It must've been so hard for them to maintain their dignity when others looked down on them or, worse, didn't see them at all. — Diane Guerrero

The ceremony was fast so we wouldn't be caught. When it was over, the men all whispered 'Mazel tov' and climbed back onto their shelves. I went up to the boy and pressed the wooden horse into his hands, the only present I could give him. The boy looked at me with big, round eyes. Had I ever been so young?
'We are alive,' I told him. 'We are alive, and that is all that matters. We cannot let them tear us from the pages of the world.'
I said it as much for me as for him. I said it in memory of Uncle Moshe, and my mother and father, and my aunts and other uncles and cousins. The Nazis had put me in a gas chamber. I had thought I was dead, but I was alive. I was a new man that day, just like the bar mitzvah boy. I was a new man, and I was going to survive. — Alan Gratz

Hopefulness is the heartbeat of the relationship between a parent and child. Each time a child overcomes the next challenge of hislife, his triumph encourages new growth in his parents. In this sense a child is parent to his mother and father. — Louise J. Kaplan

As I flew back from New Zealand to bury my mother, it occurred to me that no matter how harrowing her loss was and how keenly it will always be felt, there was, nevertheless, a sense of relief that my father, sisters and I could say a final goodbye after the longest goodbye and relief that my mum had finally been released. — James Nesbitt

They were dead; I could no longer deny it. What a thing to acknowledge in your heart! To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures to people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. — Yann Martel

My dad was a New York City cop. His father was a New York City fireman. And my mother's dad was a city taxi driver. — Joe Lhota

I thrust Sophie into a corner, blocking her with my body. She panted and snagged her lower lip in her teeth. "This is not my life," she insisted.
I looked at her solemnly. "I'm afraid it is. But it doesn't have to be for long. Let's just get through this. Then things go back to normal for you."
"Like they keep going back to normal for you?" Sophie hissed. "Ghost of your mother, psycho ex-best friend, company agent dating your dad, psychic vampire ex-boyfriend, werewolf current boyfriend - by the way, I can't blame you for that one," she confessed, eyes round as she mouthed the word whoa before continuing with her list, "Trip to the asylum, attempts against your life, vigilante father ... "
"Hey, the last ones are brand new. And the vigilante father thing? He'll revert."
"Anyhow, I'm not so keen on your concept of normal." I caught her staring at me. — Shannon Delany

People always ask me: 'When is the new Pele going to be born?' Never. My father and mother have closed the factory. — Pele

In an ideal society, mothers and fathers would produce potty- trained, civilized, responsible new citizens while government and corporate leaders would provide a safe, healthy, economically just community. — Mary Blakely

There is a noticeable strain. It is as though somewhere, in one of the more remote rooms of the house, a cease-fire has been signed, and now all the parties are endeavoring to honor it, at least until tomorrow, at least until a new consignment of ammunition comes in. We are all acting, pretending to be relaxed, impersonating the ideal mother, father, sisters, brother, boyfriend, fiancee. And so it is a relief when Clare looks at her watch, gets up off the couch, and says, Come on, it's time to go over to Laura's. — Audrey Niffenegger

[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue. — Dave Eggers

Out of your awareness you cannot become soldiers in a war because you will be able to see, with clear eyes, that you are going to kill people - people who have done no harm to you personally, people just like you. They have their children, their wives, their mothers, their old fathers to take care of - and you are killing the person just to get a gold medal. Your gun will slip out of your hand, and that will be an act of awareness. And you will feel tremendously blissful that it happened; even if you are being shot your death will be a glory, a peace, an adventure, a journey into a new world. — Rajneesh